Wilford Woodruff

(1807-1898)

A member of the Mormon advance party that reached the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847, Wilford Woodruff had joined the church in 1832 at its original settlement in Kirtland, Ohio. Made an Apostle of the Church in 1839, when the Mormons had re-settled at Nauvoo, Illinois, Woodruff traveled widely throughout the United States as a missionary for the faith and made two successful missionary trips to England in the early 1840's. In Utah, he was a community leader whose journal of those early days has become a key document in the history of the church.

Woodruff was appointed the official church historian in 1875, president of the Twelve Apostles of the Church in 1880, and succeeded to the church presidency in 1889. In 1890 he issued the "Manifesto" that brought the Mormon practice of plural marriage, or polygamy, to an end, and it was under his leadership that the church began its withdrawal from domination of social, political and economic life in Utah.